'A New History of German Literature' offers some 200 essays on events in German literary history.

This is the first book to describe German literary history up to the unification of Germany in 1990. It takes a fresh look at the main authors and movements, and also asks what Germans in a given period were actually reading and writing, what they would have seen at the local theatre or found in the local lending library; it includes, for example, discussions of literature in Latin as well as in German, eighteenth-century letters and popular novels, Nazi literature and radio plays, and modern Swiss and Austrian literature. A new prominence is given to writing by women. Contributors, all leading scholars in their field, have re-examined standard judgements in writing a history for our own times. The book is designed for the general reader as well as the advanced student: titles and quotations are translated, and there is a comprehensive bibliography.

In Translating the World, Birgit Tautz provides a new narrative of German literary history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Departing from dominant modes of thought regarding the nexus of literary and national imagination, she examines this intersection through the lens of Germany’s emerging global networks and how they were rendered in two very different German cities: Hamburg and Weimar. German literary history has tended to employ a conceptual framework that emphasizes the nation or idealized citizenry, yet the experiences of readers in eighteenth-century German cities existed within the context of their local environments, in which daily life occurred and writers such as Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe worked. Hamburg, a flourishing literary city in the late eighteenth century, was eventually relegated to the margins of German historiography, while Weimar, then a small town with an insular worldview, would become mythologized for not only its literary history but its centrality in national German culture. By interrogating the histories of and texts associated with these cities, Tautz shows how literary styles and genres are born of local, rather than national, interaction with the world. Her examination of how texts intersect and interact reveals how they shape and transform the urban cultural landscape as they are translated and move throughout the world. A fresh, elegant exploration of literary translation, discursive shifts, and global cultural changes, Translating the World is an exciting new story of eighteenth-century German culture and its relationship to expanding global networks that will especially interest scholars of comparative literature, German studies, and literary history.

Beginning with the emergence of German-language literature on the international stage in the mid-eighteenth century, the book plays down conventional labels and periodization of German literary history in favour of the explanatory force of international cultural impact. It explains, for instance, how specifically German and Austrian conditions shaped major contributions to European literary culture such as Romanticism and the 'language scepticism' of the early twentieth century. --

New essays providing an account of the shaping beliefs, preoccupations, motifs, and values of Weimar Classicism.

From Goethe to Gundolf: Essays on German Literature and Culture is a collection of Roger Paulin’s groundbreaking essays, spanning the last forty years. The work represents his major research interests of Romanticism and the reception of Shakespeare in Germany, but also explores a broader range of themes, from poetry and the public memorialization of poets to fairy stories - all meticulously researched, yet highly accessible. As a comprehensive examination of German literary history in the period 1700-1900, the collection not only includes accounts of the lives and work of Goethe, Schiller, the Schlegels, and Gundolf (amongst others), serving to nuance our understanding of these figures in history, but also considers diverse (and often underexplored) topics, from academic freedom to the rise of travel literature. The essays have been reformulated, corrected, and updated to add references to recent works. However, the core foundations of the originals remain, and just as when they were first published, the value of these essays – to researchers, students, and all those who are interested in German literary history – cannot be overstated.

Building a National Literature boldly takes issue with traditional literary criticism for its failure to explain how literature as a body is created and shaped by institutional forces. Peter Uwe Hohendahl approaches literary history by focusing on the material and ideological structures that determine the canonical status of writers and works. He examines important elements in the making of a national literature, including the political and literary public sphere, the theory and practice of literary criticism, and the emergence of academic criticism as literary history. Hohendahl considers such key aspects of the process in Germany as the rise of liberalism and nationalism, the delineation of the borders of German literature, the idea of its history, the understanding of its cultural function, and the notion of a canon of major and minor authors.

Germany has had a profound influence on English stories for children. The Brothers Grimm, The Swiss Family Robinson and Johanna Spyri's Heidi quickly became classics but, as David Blamires clearly articulates in this volume, many other works have been fundamental in the development of English chilren's stories during the 19th Centuary and beyond. Telling Tales is the first comprehensive study of the impact of Germany on English children's books, covering the period from 1780 to the First World War. Beginning with The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, moving through the classics and including many other collections of fairytales and legends (Musaus, Wilhelm Hauff, Bechstein, Brentano) Telling Tales covers a wealth of translated and adapted material in a large variety of forms, and pays detailed attention to the problems of translation and adaptation of texts for children. In addition, Telling Tales considers educational works (Campe and Salzmann), moral and religious tales (Carove, Schmid and Barth), historical tales, adventure stories and picture books (including Wilhelm Busch's Max and Moritz) together with an analysis of what British children learnt through textbooks about Germany as a country and its variegated history, particularly in times of war.

While the first decade after the fall of the Berlin wall was marked by the challenges of unification and the often difficult process of reconciling East and West German experiences, many Germans expected that the “new century” would achieve “normalization.” The essays in this volume take a closer look at Germany’s new normalcy and argue for a more nuanced picture that considers the ruptures as well as the continuities. Germany’s new generation of writers is more diverse than ever before, and their texts often not only speak of a Germany that is multicultural but also take a more playful attitude toward notions of identity. Written with an eye toward similar and dissimilar developments and traditions on both sides of the Atlantic, this volume balances overviews of significant trends in present-day cultural life with illustrative analyses of individual writers and texts.

German writers, be it Goethe, Nietzsche, Marx, Brecht or Mann, have had a profound influence on the modern world. This Very Short Introduction illuminates the particular character and power of German literature, and examines its impact on the wider cultural world.